A gripping tale enhanced by a convincingly detailed setting and drawing on classic fantasy memes.
Jess and her widowed mother eke out a genteel living in Victorian England as spiritualists, claiming to communicate with the dead; when a cryptic message replaces the fake they’ve prepared for a grieving client, her mother—terrified—insists they flee to London.
There, sheltered by her parents’ wealthy, half-faerie associate, Balthazar, Jess learns the three were members of the League of Ravens, using their genuine occult powers to defeat Mephisto, a diabolical gang reanimating the dead. Balthazar tells Jess she’s a mesmerist, able to enter the minds of those around her. Joining the reconstituted league, Jess moves into a house in London’s impoverished East End. Residents include Emily, who can conjure light, and Gabriel, whose gift relies on music—both plucked from a dismal orphanage to combat Mephisto. Jess is stunned, too, by the brutal poverty she sees. Her gift helps her empathize with its scarred victims, now threatened by a mysterious, deadly plague, its rapid spread blamed on communists and immigrants. Fear once prevented Jess from aiding Deepa, an Indian friend victimized by bias and hatred (Jess and the other characters appear to be white); now, she fights injustice in two worlds. Exploring fictional terrain far from the 1930s Alabama so powerfully conveyed in the award-winning Hoodoo (2015), Smith continues to display a deft mastery of worldbuilding and creepy, atmospheric plotting.
A gripping tale enhanced by a convincingly detailed setting and drawing on classic fantasy memes. (Fantasy/horror. 10-12)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-44528-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
It’s great to see these kids “so enthusiastic about committing high treason.” (historical note) (Historical fiction. 10-12)
Near the end of World War II, two kids join their parents in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
Max, 12, lives with his parents and his older sister in a Berlin that’s under constant air bombardment. During one such raid, a mortally wounded man stumbles into the white German family’s home and gasps out his last wish: “The Führer must die.” With this nighttime visitation, Max and Gerta discover their parents have been part of a resistance cell, and the siblings want in. They meet a colorful band of upper-class types who seem almost too whimsical to be serious. Despite her charming levity, Prussian aristocrat and cell leader Frau Becker is grimly aware of the stakes. She enlists Max and Gerta as couriers who sneak forged identification papers to Jews in hiding. Max and Gerta are merely (and realistically) cogs in the adults’ plans, but there’s plenty of room for their own heroism. They escape capture, rescue each other when they’re caught out during an air raid, and willingly put themselves repeatedly at risk to catch a spy. The fictional plotters—based on a mix of several real anti-Hitler resistance cells—are portrayed with a genuine humor, giving them the space to feel alive even in such a slim volume.
It’s great to see these kids “so enthusiastic about committing high treason.” (historical note) (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-35902-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map.
A girl who delights in the macabre harnesses her inherited supernatural ability.
It’s not just her stark white hair that makes 11-year-old Zee Puckett stand out in nowheresville Knobb’s Ferry. She’s a storyteller, a Mary Shelley fangirl, and is being raised by her 21-year-old high school dropout sister while their father looks for work upstate (cue the wayward glances from the affluent demography). Don’t pity her, because Zee doesn’t acquiesce to snobbery, bullying, or pretty much anything that confronts her. But a dog with bleeding eyes in a cemetery gives her pause—momentarily—because the beast is just the tip of the wicked that has this way come to town. Time to get some help from ghosts. The creepy supernatural current continues throughout, intermingled with very real forays into bullying (Zee won’t stand for it or for the notion that good girls need to act nice), body positivity, socio-economic status and social hierarchy, and mental health. This debut from a promising writer involves a navigation of caste systems, self-esteem, and villainy that exists in an interesting world with intriguing characters, but they receive a flat, two-dimensional treatment that ultimately makes the book feel like one is learning a ho-hum lesson in morality. Zee is presumably White (as is her rich-girl nemesis–cum-comrade, Nellie). Her best friend, Elijah, is cued as Black. Warning: this just might spur frenzied requests for Frankenstein.
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map. (Supernatural. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304460-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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